The Portion of Labor Part 69

"You'd better go and eat your dinner, George May," she said, in her sweet, shrill voice. "First thing you know the whistle will blow.

Here's yours, Ed." With that she pulled out a leather bag from under the desk, where she had volunteered to place it for warmth and safety against the coil of steam-pipes.

"I don't believe your coffee is very cold, Ed," said she.

The laster glared from one to the other jealously. Dennison went towards a shelf where he had stored away his luncheon, when he stopped suddenly and listened, as did the others. There came a great uproar of applause from the next room beyond. Then it subsided, and a girl's clear, loud voice was heard.

"What is going on?" cried Nellie Stone. She jumped up and ran to the door, still eating her pie, and the men followed her.

At the end of one of the work-rooms, backed against a snowy window, clung about with shreds of the driving storm, stood Ellen Brewster, with some other girls around her, and a few men on the outskirts, and a steady, curious movement of all the other workmen towards her, as of iron filings towards a magnet, and she was talking.

Her voice was quite audible all over the great room. It was low-pitched, but had a wonderful carrying quality, and there was something marvellous in its absolute confidence.

"If you men will do nothing, and say nothing, it is time for a girl to say and act," she proclaimed. "I did not dream for a minute that you would yield to this cut in wages. Why should you have your wages cut?"

"The times are pretty hard," said a doubtful voice among her auditors.

"What if the times are hard? What is that to you? Have you made them hard? It is the great capitalists who have made them hard by s.h.i.+fting the wealth too much to one side. They are the ones who should suffer, not you. What have you done, except come here morning after morning in cold or heat, rain or s.h.i.+ne, and work with all your strength? They who have precipitated the hard times are the ones who should bear the brunt of them. Your work is the same now as it was then, the strain on your flesh and blood and muscles is the same, your pay should be the same."

"That's so," said Abby Atkins, in a reluctant, surly fas.h.i.+on.

"That's so," said another girl, and another. Then there was a fusilade of hand-claps started by the girls, and somewhat feebly echoed by the men.

One or two men looked rather uneasily back towards Dennison and Flynn and two more foremen who had come forward.

"It ain't as though we had something to fall back on," said a man's grumbling voice. "It's easy to talk when you 'ain't got a wife and five children dependent on you."

"That's so," said another man, doggedly.

"That has nothing to do with it," said Ellen, firmly. "We can all club together, and keep the wolf from the door for those who are hardest pressed for a while; and as for me, if I were a man--"

She paused a minute. When she spoke again her voice was full of childlike enthusiasm; it seemed to ring like a song.

"If I were a man," said she, "I would go out in the street and dig--I would beg, I would steal--before I would yield--I, a free man in a free country--to tyranny like this!"

There was a great round of applause at that. Dennison scowled and said something in a low voice to another foreman at his side. Flynn laughed, with a perplexed, admiring look at Ellen.

"The question is," said Tom Peel, slouching on the outskirts of the throng, and speaking in an imperturbable, compelling, drawling voice, "whether the free men in the free country are going to kick themselves free, or into tighter places, by kicking."

"If you have got to stop to count the cost of bravery and standing up for your rights, there would be no bravery in the world,"

returned Ellen, with disdain.

"Oh, I am ready to kick," said Peel, with his mask-like smile.

"So am I," said Granville Joy, in a loud voice. Amos Lee came rus.h.i.+ng through the crowd to Ellen's side. He had been eating his dinner in another room, and had just heard what was going on. He opened his mouth with a motion as of letting loose a flood of ranting, but somebody interposed. John Sargent, bulky and irresistible in his steady resolution, put him aside and stood before him.

"Look here," he said to them all. "There may be truth in what Miss Brewster says, but we must not act hastily; there is too much at stake. Let us appoint a committee and go to see Mr. Lloyd this evening, and remonstrate on the cutting of the wages." He turned to Ellen in a kindly, half-paternal fas.h.i.+on. "Don't you see it would be better?" he said.

She looked at him doubtfully, her cheeks glowing, her eyes like stars. She was freedom and youth incarnate, and rebellious against all which she conceived as wrong and tyrannical. She could hardly admit, in her fire of enthusiasm, of pure indignation, of any compromise or arbitration. All the griefs of her short life, she had told herself, were directly traceable to the wrongs of the system of labor and capital, and were awakening within her as freshly as if they had just happened.

She remembered her father, exiled in his prime from his place in the working world by this system of arbitrary employment; she remembered her aunt in the asylum; poor little Amabel; her own mother toiling beyond her strength on underpaid work; Maria coughing her life away.

She remembered her own life twisted into another track from the one which she should have followed, and there was for the time very little reason or justice in her. That injustice which will arise to meet its kind in equal combat had arisen in her heart. Still, she yielded. "Perhaps you are right," she said to Sargent. She had always liked John Sargent, and she respected him.

"I am sure it is the best course," he said to her, still in that low, confidential voice.

It ended in a committee of four--John Sargent, Amos Lee, Tom Peel, and one of the older lasters, a very respectable man, a deacon in the Baptist Church--being appointed to wait on Robert Lloyd that evening.

When the one-o'clock whistle blew, Ellen went back to her machine.

She was very pale, but she was conscious of a curious steadiness of all her nerves. Abby leaned towards her, and spoke low in the roar of wheels.

"I'll back you up, if I die for it," she said.

But Sadie Peel, on the other side, spoke quite openly, with a laugh and shrug of her shoulders. "Land," she said, "father'll be with you. He's bound to strike. He struck when he was in McGuire's. Catch father givin' up anything. But as for me, I wish you'd all slow up an' stick to work, if you do get a little less. If we quit work I can't have a nea.r.s.eal cape, and I've set my heart on a nea.r.s.eal cape this winter."

Chapter LII

Ellen resolved that she would say as little as possible about the trouble at home that night. She did not wish her parents to worry over it until it was settled in one way or another.

When her mother asked what they had done about the wage-cutting, she replied that a committee had been appointed to wait on Mr. Lloyd that evening, and talk it over with him; then she said nothing more.

"He won't give in if he's like his uncle," said f.a.n.n.y.

Ellen went on eating her supper in silence. Her father glanced at her with sharp solicitude.

"Maybe he will," said he.

"No, he won't," returned f.a.n.n.y.

Ellen was very pale and her eyes were bright. After supper she went to the window and pressed her face against the gla.s.s, s.h.i.+elding her eyes from the in-door light, and saw that the storm had quite ceased. The stars were s.h.i.+ning and the white boughs of the trees las.h.i.+ng about in the northwest wind. She went into the entry, where she had hung her hat and coat, and began putting them on.

"Where are you going, Ellen?" asked her mother.

"Just down to Abby's a minute."

"You don't mean to say your are goin' out again in this snow, Ellen Brewster? I should think you were crazy." When f.a.n.n.y said crazy, she suddenly started and shuddered as if she had struck herself. She thought of Eva. Always the possibility of a like doom was in her own mind.

"It has stopped snowing, mother," Ellen said.

"Stopped snowing! What if it has? The roads ain't cleared. You can't get down to Abby Atkins's without gettin' wet up to your knees. I should think if you got into the house after such a storm you'd have sense enough to stay in. I've worried just about enough."

Ellen took off her coat and hat and hung them up again. "Well, I won't go if you feel so, mother," she said, patiently.

"It seems as if you might get along without seein' Abby Atkins till to-morrow mornin', when you'd seen her only an hour ago," f.a.n.n.y went on, in the high, nagging tone which she often adopted with those whom she loved the dearest.

"Yes, I can," said Ellen. It seemed to her that she must see somebody with whom she could talk about the trouble in the factory, but she yielded. There was always with the girl a perfect surface docility, as that she seemed to have no resistance, but a little way down was a rock-bed of firmness. She lighted her lamp, and took her library book and went up-stairs to bed to read. But she could not read, and she could not sleep when she had put aside her book and extinguished her lamp. She could think of nothing except Robert, and what he would say to the committee. She lay awake all night thinking of it. Ellen was a girl who was capable of the most devoted love, and the most intense dissent and indignation towards the same person. She could love in spite of faults, and she could see faults in spite of love. She thought of Robert Lloyd as of the one human soul whom she loved best out of the whole world, whom she put before everybody else, even her own self, and she also thought of him with a wrath which was pitiless and uncompromising, and which seemed to tear her own heart to pieces, for one cannot be wroth with love without a set-back of torture. "If he does not give in and raise the wages, I shall hate him," thought Ellen; and her heart stung her as if at the touch of a hot iron, and then she could have struck herself for the supposition that he would not give in. "He must,"

she told herself, with a great fervor of love. "He must."